Uncovering Harwood Steiger

My fate was sealed when a few weeks later an Ebayer posted a listing for three different Steiger remnants.  One was black printing on a luscious blue, one was green printing on a natural linen and the last was black on rust.  They were totally different from my earlier purchases.  The first two were different leaf designs.  The rust piece was a stylized Native American design. Gotta have 'em.  My addiction was taking hold in a big way.

When they arrived I just kept holding them and searching each piece for clues about their maker.  Now, I had to know who is this Harwood Steiger, guy???  This time I read every item that came up on the Google search.  There were referrences to Harwood Steiger, the painter and examples of the work of Harwood Steiger, the silk screen artist.  It wasn't until I talked with a gallery owner in Tucson that my suspicions were confirmed.  Harwood Steiger was both painter and silk screen artist.  Not much was known about him.  There were lists of exhibits in which he participated, sketchy biographical information, and photos of his paintings.  But, there was nothing, absolutely nothing about silk screened textiles.  There was nothing to connect this landscape/cityscape artist with the botanical and Native American subjects depicted on the textiles.  People in the art world sort of knew about the textiles, but nobody had any information about what was proving to be a large body of work from Tubac.

As the weeks and months rolled on, I acquired more Steiger fabrics, usually from Ebay.  Each one was a treasure.  More cactus, desert birds, Native American symbols and abstract designs.  I would lay them out on the dining room table and just look at them.  My husband, a usually indugent man, finally asked what I was going to do with all this seemingly unrelated fabric.  He was accustomed to quilting auditions where I'd lay out fabrics to see if they worked together.  Obviously, this fabric was not a quilting audition.  None of it seemed to work together.  I don't know, was my answer.  But, I sure do love it.  I carefully combed through all the blog postings that mentioned Harwood Steiger.  Most were from folks like myself who happened to find a piece (usually in a thrift shop) and made something wonderful with it.  Finally, one blogger said Somebody ought to write a book about this guy.  That's the seed that was planted and explains why I am where I am today:  developing a book on the silk screened textiles of Harwood Steiger.